New York is where many college graduates go to reinvent themselves. Census data shows that in 2023, more than 6% of recent college graduates moved to New York, almost double the percentage of the next most-popular United States city. USC graduates are no exception. While the majority of Trojans stay in California after graduation, every summer, there is a steady flow of alums who head east to New York, and a new “NYC” is promptly added to their Instagram bios. 

Here’s the issue: You’ll never become a New Yorker. 

This isn’t meant to be a slogan to gatekeep. It’s not meant to be a dig or a demand that you prove yourself by surviving six miserable winters or memorizing train lines. It’s a reminder that a city isn’t something you can wear, buy or brand yourself into. 

Yet transplants keep trying. They arrive and perform the role of “New Yorker” as if it’s a costume, clinging to symbols and competing to out-New York one another. It turns into a performance, with transplants competing over who can act the most “New York.” Riding the train becomes a method to prove toughness, knowing a pizza spot becomes a badge of authenticity and struggling through daily inconveniences gets spun as street credibility. 

Ordinary city life gets transformed into a contest of discomfort, with image-making standing in for identity. 

This isn’t a problem unique to New York, nor is it a new one. Every city with some cultural weight attracts people who try to rebrand themselves through it. Los Angeles has its own version. Transplants move west, and within weeks, they’re “so L.A.” because they’ve bought an Erewhon smoothie, hiked Runyon Canyon and memorized “the 405.” They compress one of the most sprawling cities in the U.S. into a mood board of wellness and vintage denim. 

In Paris, London, Boston, Miami, Austin — the same pattern repeats. People move in, announce they’ve discovered the real city, then slowly reshape neighborhoods until their original character is either priced out or marketed as something for them to consume. Suddenly, the taco stand is a “hidden gem,” the dive bar is an “authentic local spot” and rent doubles for families who built those communities long before anyone called them “up-and-coming.”

This isn’t a critique of migration itself. Cities depend on newcomers; they’ve always grown by absorbing perspectives, cultures and energy from outside. The problem comes when arrival gets mistaken for ownership. Moving somewhere doesn’t grant you authority to define it, and it certainly doesn’t entitle you to erase the people who made it what it was in the first place. 

Performance has consequences. When enough people chase the same curated version of city living, the market bends to meet their needs. Coffee shops replace corner stores and rents skyrocket. The character that drew transplants in gets hollowed out until all that’s left is an expensive imitation; the very people chasing “authenticity” are the ones sanding it away. 

The train isn’t proof of adaptation — it’s just public transportation. A neighborhood deli isn’t a badge of credibility — it’s food. Walking seven blocks with your groceries isn’t toughness — it’s just reality. 

The same goes for neighborhoods. The West Village has always been the West Village, West L.A. has always been West L.A. and Williamsburg has been Williamsburg for as long as I can remember. But if you told me in high school that St. Mark’s Place would one day become the epicenter of transplant culture, I would’ve laughed. 

A place once for high schoolers to get piercings or cheap food is now overrun with transplants and packaged as a “must-see” location for people trying to prove they’ve unlocked the real New York.  

In L.A., USC students see this around them in real time. Silver Lake, once sustained by native Angelenos, has been steadily rebranded for outsiders. People are left to watch the neighborhoods they grew up in become unrecognizable. 

This isn’t about economics; it’s about culture. Transplants flatten entire identities into an aesthetic shorthand. A multidimensional, multicultural city becomes an easy-to-digest accessory, a backdrop and a brand. Cities are not monoliths — they’re ecosystems — and reducing them to a $20 smoothie or subway line isn’t just shallow; it’s destructive. 

When you make a city your costume, you stop seeing it as someone’s home. Your travel destination, your fantasy of “city life,” is someone else’s everyday. What matters is how you live in a city: whether you adapt to it or demand it adapt to you. The first adds something; the latter erases. Cities don’t need you to cosplay them, and you don’t need to rebrand yourself in the process. 

So no, you’ll never become a New Yorker in the same way you’ll never become an Angeleno. And that’s fine. Be yourself in that new city, but remember — that place will never become your hometown.